MySQL Enterprise Backup

Friday Jun 28, 2013

MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) is the ideal solution for backing up MySQL databases. MEB 3.8.2 is released in June 2013.

MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8.2 release’s main goal is to improve usability. With this release, users can know the progress of backup completed both in terms of size and as a percentage of the total. This release also offers options to be able to manage the behavior of MEB in case the space on the secondary storage is completely exhausted during backup.

The progress indicator is a (short) string that indicates how far the execution of a time-consuming MEB command has progressed. It consists of one or more "meters" that measures the progress of the command. There are two options introduced to control the progress reporting function of mysqlbackup command (1) –show-progress (2) –progress-interval.

The user can control the progress indicator by using “--show-progress” option in any of the MEB operations. This option instructs MEB to output periodically short reports on the progress of time-consuming commands. The argument of this option instructs where the output could be sent. For example it could be stderr, stdout, file, fifo and table.

With the “--show-progress” option both the total size of the backup to be copied and the size that’s already copied will be shown. Along with this, the state of the operation for example data or meta-data being copied or tables being locked and other such operations will also be reported. This gives more clear information to the DBA on the progress of the backup that’s happening.

Interval between progress report in seconds is controlled by “--progress-interval” option.

MEB can also be accessed through GUI from MySQL WorkBench’s next version. This can be used as the front end interface for MEB users to perform backup operations at the click of a button. This feature was highly requested by DBAs and will be very useful. Refer http://insidemysql.com/mysql-workbench-6-0-a-sneak-preview/ for WorkBench upcoming release info.

Along with the progress report feature some of the important issues like below are also addressed in MEB 3.8.2.

In MEB 3.8.2 a new command line option “--on-disk-full” is introduced to abort or warn the user when a backup process encounters a full disk condition. When no option is given, by default it would abort.

A few issues related to “incremental-backup” are also addressed in this release. Please refer 3.8.2 documentation for more details. It would be good for MEB users to move to 3.8.2 to take incremental backups.

Overall the added usability and the important defects fixed in this release makes MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8.2 a promising release.